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PDF FormatHollow Land is not and does not purport to be an academic work. Rather, it was drafted entirely to serve the author’s ideological views, which are, as noted above, hostile to all things Israeli. Right at the book’s beginning, Weizman declares,
Although this book is largely framed between 1967 and the present, and primarily within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does not seek to claim that the spatial injustices of the conflict started only after the Six Day War of June 1967, and that the extent of the present injustices are confined to the 1967 occupied territories. Nor does it underestimate the century-old process of Zionist colonization, land grab, and dispossession that preceded it.
In other words, Weizman believes that the occupation of 1967 is nothing but a natural continuation of the “occupation” of 1948 and the Zionist crimes that preceded it. The occupation that has taken place in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the Six Day War are, to his mind, nothing but a “laboratory of the extreme” that underscores the brutality that has characterized Zionism from the outset. In line with this approach, Weizman often refers even to Jewish towns within the Green Line as “settlements.” He also expresses his displeasure at efforts to renovate Palestinian refugee camps, worrying that such improvements may jeopardize their residents’ “right of return.”
Reading Hollow Land, one is left with the impression that Israel can do nothing at all of which Weizman would approve. Quite simply, the Jewish state contaminates everything with which it comes in contact. Frequently this stance leads him into flagrant contradictions, such as when he condemns Israel both for dismantling evacuated settlements and for considering the possibility of not doing so; both for making life difficult for Palestinian residents of the territories and for preventing a humanitarian crisis there (in order to consolidate its control, of course). He attacks the IDF’s decision to use precision-guided munitions with special warheads (which cause fewer civilian casualties) because, he argues, it renders targeted killings (of terrorists, that is) more “tolerable,” and he denounces Israeli architecture in Jerusalem because it aspires to a false “Orientalist” authenticity. To Weizman, even the shingled roofs used in settlement housing are just a means of demonstrating distinction from Arab homes, although almost every community in Israel has them.
His use of data is also decidedly selective. For example, he claims that “from the beginning of the [second] Intifada to the end of 2006, 339 Palestinians were killed in targeted IDF assassinations. Only 210 of those were the intended targets; the rest were Palestinians whose daily lives brought them to the wrong place at the wrong time.” On the face of it, this description is indeed disturbing. It is therefore a shame that Weizman did not bother to follow the statistics relating to such casualties over the years. Since he does not do so, the reader has no way of knowing that the rate of Palestinian non combatants killed as a result of targeted assassinations decreased consistently since 2003, when it was near 50 percent, to less than 10 percent in 2005-2006, finally dropping to just 2-3 percent in 2007 (after the book was published)—a figure that bespeaks careful, concerted efforts on the part of the IDF to reduce civilian casualties whenever possible.
Weizman’s heavy reliance on data from B’Tselem reports is also problematic, because the organization counts Palestinians as “combatants” only if they are engaged in terrorist activity at the time of their death. In 2008, for example, B’Tselem reported that more than a third of Palestinians killed in IDF targeted assassinations during the previous year had not “taken part in hostilities.” An investigation by researcher Yehonatan Dahuh-Levi into Palestinian publications, however, revealed that over 80 percent of those killed were known, active members of terrorist organizations. Weizman also claims that targeted killings did not help reduce Palestinian violence, and did nothing to curb Palestinians’ hatred of Israel. He may be right with regard to the latter, but surely the fact of the overwhelming reduction in Palestinian terrorist activities following operations Defensive Shield and Determined Path in 2002, together with the temporary paralysis of Hamas after the killing of most of its leadership in 2004 cannot be so easily dismissed.
Nor is Weizman averse to demagogic and irrelevant historical analogies. When discussing the Ring Road, a complex traffic artery in East Jerusalem, for example, he deems it relevant to mention a 1939 proposal by Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to connect the city of Danzig to Germany via an extraterritorial road across Poland. Yet for some reason, Weizman ignores the more recent, and far more relevant, case of the 1954 American “Plan Alpha,” which tried to force Israel to give up part of the Negev in order to create a passageway between Egypt and Jordan, with similar extraterritorial road arrangements. One imagines that referring to Eisenhower in this context is simply not as effective as invoking Ribbentrop. In the same vein, Weizman writes that “the military code name for the Jenin camp, in which resistance groups were most strongly entrenched, was ‘Germania.’ Whether in reference to Tacitus’s ambivalent description of the barbarians, or in reference to the Nazi regime, this term encapsulates the fear of the ‘evil’ it believes is bred.” This is, unquestionably, a brilliant piece of rhetoric, but it bears no relation whatsoever to reality. In all likelihood, Weizman has never heard of the IDF’s practice of giving cities and countries code names whose first letter are the same in the Hebrew alphabet (Jenin and Germany, or Germania in modern Hebrew, both begin with the third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Gimmel). Accordingly, certain areas around Jenin were called Milan and Naples. Weizman may insist that these names, too, reflect certain of Israel’s existential terrors (of fashion and pizza, perhaps?), but this is doubtful. More likely, sometimes a code name is just a code name, and nothing else.
